Jon and Heather Armstrong's Divorce

Some of the folks on the Dooce community website have wanted to discuss it, but older/wiser/better compensated for their time heads have prevailed. Of course, Internet strangers should be allowed to have private lives, even after they pull back the curtain a little before dropping it.
I don't think most people wanted to gossip or declare Team Jon or Team Heather. I know I have an odd feeling of knowing people I can't possibly know, just because they are talented writers and convey a sense of their lives through their writing and photos. Harder to figure out is why the news bothered me so much; I really identify with Jon's grief for his years of effort and the effect the divorce will have on the kids.  It's probably easier to take the news of divorces in our real-life circles because you can see a lot of those coming; body language tells people all over church when you least realize it.
Plus, we were all rooting for them, all the time, glad for the good stuff and howling at their tormentors when Maytag or the crazy homeowner or Mormons deserved it. It was part of the Dooce experience; so much that we got used to being chastised for mentioning that Heather stopped being funny about a year ago. That was the "f" word that could not be named.  So now we know why she stopped being funny, and there's a weird sense of guilt about acknowledging that, too; like she wasn't dancing fast enough for us while her life was crumbling somewhere else.
I wonder what Leta thinks of what the internet says about her family. She is certainly a good enough reader to know. I couldn't stand the thought of being a preacher's wife with the public life that entails, so I can't imagine a fully public life on the internet.

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 3

I stopped in the manager's office today at the gym. She was sitting at her computer looking sadly at the screen. I asked her if she had heard about the hot tub follies over the weekend. Indeed she had, and was about to handle that situation as soon as she solved the problem in front of her. Oddly, it also had to do with the ladies' locker room. She seemed mournful and without hope.
"What else could be going on in the ladies' locker room? My word!" was my inquiry.
"Nudity," she said hopelessly. "Someone was offended because the ladies in there have nudity when they are changing and it makes this person feel uncomfortable."
Wait, what?
"Hold on a minute. A woman is complaining that the women who are changing clothes in the clothes-changing area make her feel uncomfortable?"
"Yes," she sighed sadly. "And I can't think of a thing to tell her."
I pondered briefly and a helpful thought came to me.
"Tell her if she thinks those naked women are bad, just take a look in the hot tub of a Saturday and she will really get an eyeful. Those naked old ladies will look positively tame."
We both hooted like old Southern ladies love to do.  Then she grew sad again.
"I can't tell her that."

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 2

Squick also ewwwww also WTF.
My Catholic friends used to say, "Shit Marie" when something was too bad for mere profanity and needed true blasphemy to convey their emotions.
Shit Marie.
I saw Towel Freak Woman leaving the gym today as I was coming in late. She was wearing workout gear and her hair was not wet so I thought I'd dodged a bullet and they had told her ack rite or don show up.
How wrong can one old lady be?
Very wrong.
I got out of the pool, padded into the shower room, and SHIT MARIE there she is, towel tied over boobs, kneeling over the STRONGEST nozzle in the Jacuzzi.  I turned around and padded, dripping, to the front desk and complained my ass off in no uncertain terms: "I told Angela last week there was a woman masturbating in the whirlpool over a nozzle, she said she'd get Cathy on it, and the woman is in there right now doing it again, and it's disgusting on so many levels!"
The clerk's response? "Oh my god. She needs to buy a shower massage." She had seen Towel Freak woman come to the desk as if leaving, then turn around and go back in. She apologized profusely that it hadn't been stopped last week, and promised it would not happen again. Then she said, crossly, "There is a toy store right down the street, she needs to go there instead."
I know, right?
Shit Marie, what has happened to the world. I expect this kind of craziness at work; we actually seem to have a drug ring that operates out of our driveway, where the security guards are never visible. We also have somewhere that prostitutes who are patients seem to be plying their trade, and if you walk in on most of our male patients and they are not masturbating it's because they just finished.
 I go to this high-end fitness club to get away from people like that!

Squick of the year

I've had a wicked muscle spasm in my neck for, hmmm, forever so I haven't felt like typing once I get home. But I'm still plugging along at the horrible job, like the hamster on its eternal wheel. One good thing for the month: I now weigh eight pounds less than I did at the start of last month. I am taking the adrenal and thyroid supplements and not eating fruit, sugar, or starch. Boring but effective.
The squicky icky omg grossssss gross gross thing that happened today? Well, that is the story. At the gym there is a woman who tends to come on Saturday and hog the whirlpool. It's a big one, but she gets in it and talks so loudly on her cell or plays such loud music on her phone that I generally avoid her. She also decorates the floor in the hot tub room with, no kidding, eight or ten towels in various stages of dampness. So it's like being around someone else's badly raised teen on a good day. Anyway, last week when I got out of the pool there were two other ladies in the whirlpool and the messy teen grown damn towel freak woman was perched nearby on a shower bench. I could not help but notice that she was not wearing a suit as per the four signs that read "Whirlpool Rules: Swimsuit must be worn, and don't shave your disgusting legs for Christ's sake either" but was wearing a towel tied in front over her boobs, another twisted over her hair, and nothing else but eyeliner. Yark. She stayed out while we hottubbed. As I was leaving, I could have sworn she got back in once the pool was cleared and was leaning on her elbows facing out of it. A little buzz alarm went off in my mind: was she cozying up to the jacuzzi nozzle with her towel open in front? Gross, I decided, and went off to shower and change.
Today my neck was just a little stiff, so I wanted to whirlpool it into submission after my swim and walk in the saltwater pool. I cruised into the whirlpool room and sans music was towel freak woman, leaning on her elbows  facing out of the whirlpool. She was holding a book whose pages she was not turning, and was kneeling with her legs straddled and the bubbles aimed right between them. Her superfreak towel was billowing out behind her. There was actually another woman sitting on the corner of the tub with her lower legs in the pool!
How nasty. There is not enough Clorox on the planet to clean that water. It's just a thousand gallons of douchewater, bubbling around the perverted freak who is hosing down her cooter with the jacuzzi nozzle. Ew, ew, ew. Also, fucking freak killed my chances of working on my neck.
I got dressed and skibbled out to the front desk. Sometimes the manager works on Saturdays, but she was not there today. The clerk knew exactly who I was talking about, towel freak woman comes at opening time on Saturdays and they have to ask her to leave at closing time and pick up all the towels she throws around. I used the words "unacceptable" and "disgusting" and she and I both agreed that towel freak woman needs to buy her own damn toys on the Internet and use them at home like all the other girls.  She said she'd be glad to tell the manager to ask towel freak woman to just stay home for jolly time.

Weasels and fuckers and Groundhog Day

Weasels personally dealt with this week: 6.
Fuckers personally dealt with this week: 9.
Times I woke up clutching my alarm, having popped the snooze button for more than twenty minutes unawares:2.
Times I called that lady about that job and didn't get a return call: 1.
Scale of the eyeburning, chest-tightening funk odious cheap whore cologne the idiots I share an office with wore: Mississippian. Like the river. Rolling waves of eyeburning pain.
Times I slipped up and said Damn in front of the house supervisor at the front desk: 1.
FML.

He Who Plans Makes the Gods Laugh

How is this for WTF: a girl who I used to work with fb messaged me yesterday asking if I was interested in a job in the field I'd studied so hard and spent so much money certifying in, only to not find a job it was practical to take. Ummm.
Yes, I am interested in knowing more.
Boom, her boss called me an hour later.
She says she wants me to come talk to her about it in person when the HR gnomes post the opening.
We will see about this. I'm reluctant to give up the state retirement but it's hard to overstate how much my job sucks. 

Today's Win and Fail

The win, I guess, was that I found this to be funny: Worthless supposed co-worker listens in on a phone conversation. I tell the person on the other line how his goal would be achieved, what I can do to help, where I am putting the paperwork, and the caveats on whether or not it is possible. I take his number and promise to let him know what I find out after he leaves me the paperwork.
I hang up, reach for my portfolio to take his paperwork out and start to fill it out.
Worthless supposed co-worker, whose job this actually is but whom I have stopped asking because she won't do ANYTHING, says, "Oh, I have three things to do upstairs so I will let you handle that."
Hahahahaha hilarious. Hilarious because her job description is basically to handle six to eight things a day, not three for fuck's sake, I have three besides my job description. Also hilarious because, how the fuck is she letting me handle anything when I was ALREADY DOING IT ALL.
Win because I let my face say it all and refrained from any speech, gesture, nod, or eye contact. She just finally walked off.
Today's fail was walking outside and seeing a lady in a pink housecoat smoking twenty feet from the front door. Yeah, that's against the rules, so what, the security guards come out like twice a day and run off the foul Newport addicts. The fail part is that she was sitting on a wall and had something sitting next to her. Actually, it was sitting by her, all green and shiny, with a tube going to her nose. Yep, she was smoking, outside the hospital doors, on oxygen. Our oxygen. We are a gazillion million dollars in the hole and some goofy nurse hooked this idiot up with a nasal cannula, a twenty-pound oxygen cylinder, and a rolling cart to go outside and play demolition grandma.  Good thing it was windy today.

Chemo hair? Radiation hair? Colitis malnutrition hair?

So, about a year and some months ago, I had a CT, then another, then another, and most of my hair fell out in the next six weeks. It had two more spells during colitis flares where it would start  raining down again. I'd have hair on my clothes, in the food, covering the sink, all over the floor, and big old wads in my butt crack that I never figured out how they got there. Seriously, how does a pile of hair the size of a toy mouse get past an untucked shirt and down your pants?   Twice a day?
I lost almost all my eyelashes, about half my brows, and a sizeable but unmeasurable portion of my nose hair. I can't really describe the process when your nose hair decides to let go and blow out of your nose. It doesn't look like eyelashes on your face, either. And the carpet still matched the drapes but boy did it get threadbare.
 I started with a shitload of dark mouse brown, slightly gray, very bone-straight fine hair. By the time a year had gone by, I was down to less than half the ponytail I'd had in width, it was very flat and straight indeed, and my hairline had reshaped while receding. There were a few weak looking grays coming back but not much else. I didn't need a haircut for months last winter, it actually stopped growing for a while, and my hair usually grows nearly eight inches a year; "My hair is eating my face" is how I describe my need for a bimonthly haircut as a rule. I only got it cut once last year in eight months, and only then because it was so raggedly and broken.
In September, I got hold of some meds which started holding the colitis back somewhat. About a month later, my head began to itch like crazy. When I got some privacy to scratch it, my scalp felt decidedly prickly. I started seeing this kind of crew-cut growing in around my remaining hair. So, now about four or five months later, I have two distinct heads of hair. If it's dry or static-y at all, I have a whole new set of hair about three inches long, most of it stripes of gray, a lot of it wavy, that sticks off my head like a momfro. Or the strangest mullet ever.  There are curly elflocks growing in front of my ears. Curls, on me, the flat and lifeless hair queen of the world. Frizz, even.  Bizarre doesn't begin to cover it. It's pretty cool to have hair texture, though. I've always heard that your hair grows back different after chemo; I wasn't on chemo that I knew of but I did get convinced that the first CT was an overdose. So, maybe radiation hair.
My abundant chin hair, which had stopped growing altogether last winter for six weeks and then was a little feeble and hesitant, is no longer pussyfooting around. I'm back to the daily hunt and pluck of three of the little bastards at the least. Good thing about that is most of them turned white as well, so they aren't as aggravating as when they were all black. It's weird what cheers me up sometimes.

Poltergeist

Two nights ago, I came home at ten, lugging groceries. As I staggered into the kitchen, the oddest noise got my attention, and I couldn't find it at first. Then I realized, the old fridge magnet that is a minature slot machine was making a tinny, creepy, running-down battery noise. Its bandit arm was pulled forward just a little, and it was sort of whining.
I touched the handle, and it clicked off. Then I went cold all over; that crappy thing doesn't have a decent magnet on the back, and falls off when tapped. So the cats couldn't have set it off. One of them was in the house, and not acting weird, so I looked around, and the back door was unlocked. I have gotten in the habit, since the dog died, of closing it by the deadbolt and locking it in one motion. The cat started acting strange, sniffing under all the furniture. Yikes yikes yikes.
I got the creeps, bad, and called my fella and whimpered, and he came over and shone his flashlight all around, including the attic, and flushed out no evildoers. I still had trouble going to sleep.
Last night I got home and there was a light on I didn't remember turning on that morning. Sure enough, I got too creepy to go in and had to go back and get him, and his flashlight, again.
This morning I was all, "I am TURNING THESE TWO LIGHTS ON AND REMEMBERING IT" out loud like a crazy lady.
Fella surmised one of them would burn out before I got home and he'd get summoned again. Ha, third time was the charm. No cats inside but nothing that creeped me out, either.

How to Slow Down Time

As you get older, time seems to speed up. Days and weeks seem shorter and shorter. Then, poof, there goes another month, another year. I have discovered how to stop this process cold in its tracks.
Give up eating starch.
No, seriously. I was gaining weight in a scientifically unlikely amount and writing down every bite I ate; the calorie count could not even begin to account for the four pounds a week the scale kept inexorably showing.
Then I decided: okay, if your guts think you are still starving, make them work to get the calories out of the food. So: eggs, fish, meat, veg, fruit. No sugar, wheat, potatoes, corn, or rice.
Holy shit.
A day lasts forever on this regimen. There is nothing to look forward to, and eating is not fun. The last week at work doing this was about a month long, and that's with going home one afternoon with a stomach bug.
I lost about four and a half pounds in ten days, also highly unlikely, and am not the least pleased. For this amount of suffering I should have acquired Adriana Lima's body.

What I did and didn't say

What I did say: "Oh, so you don't have time to do this assignment?"
What I didn't say: "Bitch, you don't have anything else to do, I know this for a fact, and you were supposed to come aboard and do these specific tasks. If you don't feel like helping, get out of my face and quit the fuck paging me when you know what phone I'm sitting next to, and we'll take it up with the boss."
Being a grownup is hard. Drawing the short straw on a co-worker is hard. Keeping my face neutral is impossible.

The Biggest Bra in the Store

So, yeah. I had this one bra that is a neutral color and it's the one I generally wore to work. It was big.
But the doc I went to this week to complain to about my hellish 14 pound weight gain in the last three and a half weeks and the atrocious new bone and muscle pain had little to offer. She just thinks that my insides and my metabolism were convinced I was starving to death during the Bad Year of Famous Poop, and neither one has yet gotten the message, NOT STARVING QUIT HOARDING CALORIES. And oh, that pain is refeeding myalgia, so cut back on the exercise, and we'll get you in to the endocrinologist asap.
Meanwhile, the beleaguered bra in question just gave up in exhaustion. So off I go to the bra and underwear store. Because that's where you buy bras. Except the cheery petite salesgirl measured me, thought I'd go one size up from the 36D I was sporting, and those weren't even close to big enough. I got the 38DD next, thinking this will be HUGE. And it is. Only not as far as capacity cup-wise. I could easily have worn an E. But they don't go that high in that store. I wore E's back when I was nursing and I thought the weight of my boobs would crush me if I lay down. Now I'm back in them except they don't sell them there and it was bad enough to have to buy the Biggest Bra in the Store, I was not about to hobble down the mall and look for a bra with cups big enough for my oversized head.
I am eating this primal diet thing and Saturday is the first day in nearly a month that the scale did not go up. Primal diet and endocrinologist need to handle up, I can't waddle around at nearly two hundred pounds for long without breaking a bone in my foot.

How to fix life-altering colitis

I can't really even believe I did this, much less that it worked.
My doctor gave me the long Rx for those antibiotics that helped. We talked about what would happen if they stopped helping. He mentioned a few of his patients that have not gotten any medical relief and that he was reading up on stool transplants. I had the expected reaction.  He told me a story which was not off-topic about how his teachers in medschool all completely rejected the H.Pylori hypothesis for ulcer formation as voodoo talk. Then, fifteen years later, someone devised a way to really test it and boom, almost all ulcers are curable with antibiotics. All those esteemed professors were wrong. He mildly mentioned some current researchers who attribute Crohn's to low-level TB exposure from cow's milk and UC to enterotoxic bacterial overgrowth following a viral infection. How those guys are getting hooted at now but he thinks in ten years they will be heroes. He looked at me meaningfully with that small discussion.
The antibiotics stopped working in six weeks.
The headfog was brutal, my hair started falling out again in handfuls, the belly pain was coming back, the diarrhea went from three times a day to five then eight. The arthritis called Ankylosing Spondilitis which is even meaner than it sounds, revved up so I could barely get out of my car or hold my keys. My nails started breaking to the quick either from clumsiness or poor circulation, and the muscle spasms came back in my legs and feet. I went back to pain level seven all day, every day. My face swelled up and my ears were ringing. Then the fainting started again. When your gut becomes porous, your whole body goes wrong.
It was kind of a bad two weeks.
Understatement. My last chance had failed, and I got really, really sad. Then I got desperate.
I did a stool transplant.
I haven't had diarrhea in almost two weeks. It stopped when I got the stool enema. Yes, it was as gross as it sounds.
My headfog has cleared quite a bit. My belly has almost stopped hurting. My hair stopped falling out. The musculoskeletal mess is very slowly improving, and I don't get headspin or ringing ears.
It didn't make it all the way to the ileum, which is the source of the worst pain, so that's been gradual; I may have to repeat it.
But still; kind of like a miracle. I'm so ready to have a life. I hope this gives me one back.

What I did and didn't say

"Um, they won't give that away for free, you can talk to them about it but they make a lot of money charging for that, no I am not going to ask them to give it away."

(If I were a fucking fairy godmother, I would sure as shit not be ugly, old and fat; everyone knows them wish-granting wenches fix themselves first. Am I beautiful, slender, ageless, and winged? No? Then, motherfucker, I am not your fairy godmother.)

What I did and didn't say

So here is this client. She wants me to write, let's call it a work excuse. For her relative in the hospital this week, and she wants me to state he can't make it next week, the week after that, and into March. I told her, politely, ten times, I could write and fax the excuse from the time to admission until the day she wants it written but no one gives excuses out for the future. Hoo boy. She bitched and wailed and waved what was left of the tips on her nails and yelled about me getting him in trouble until the nurses at the station almost lost their heads from craning their necks while rolling their eyes at her stupidity.
What I was dying to say but waited until I got back to my office and verbalized it to my cubicle co-slave: "Bitch, if I could predict the future your sorry ass wouldn't know what I looked like, because I'd have my lottery winnings and be locked behind a big gate with a mean, bald Israeli security force."

How Bad are Farts Supposed to Hurt?

Things you can't ask people except on the internet.

I had a minor GI bleed earlier this week; my stomach burned badly two or three days and then the telltale black sticky blood-smell diarrhea showed up. I've cleaned up hundreds of other people's GI bleeds; this one was minor by most standards. But blood and the GI tract are not very compatible and it gives you TERRIBLE gas. Like, fraternity quality death length farts. And damn, that gas is hurting in there way worse than the bleed did. I've stepped up my Citrucel and my soluble fiber; got to get that shit out! So far, it hasn't come to cropdusting people with offensive smell, hopefully it won't. I've already had one bad start at the workplace and don't need another.

Google Stats is mesmerizing

Someone on dooce told me about the stats button on here. Who knew. I knew there were a couple of my buddies besides my sister reading this but, hello Russia, hello Denmark (is that you, George?) and ya'll chime in and tell me something. Don't be shy, I'm fascinated by this.

Why I am going to Hell for Today's Win and Fail

Actually, no one who survived a life like mine has a lot of belief in religious structures like Hell except here on Earth, or in God except as some enormous wry cosmic comedian.  That being said, I know I am a bad person for today but I honestly don't care, it was still funny. Besides, I've been told a lot I have a face for radio and it's brutally true so we can't all be some mother's pretty child. One thing I used to do for fun that was easy for me, probably because of my hyperflexibility weirdness, is to cross one eye, casually, in class, and look over at a classmate without warning to crack them up. It always worked, better than wiggling my ears, and less likely to get me busted than making my boobs bounce by working my pecs singly.
Anywho, I was reluctantly holding down a very uncomfortable seat in the auditorium of Day Two in Purgatory: Or, Nursing Orientation for People Who Do Not Give a Flying Fuck. They pried the Power Point clicker out of the HBIC's hands and had her run a video instead. Oh, thrilling. Entertainment.
 Now, this is a national company who was running the blurb, mind you. but the production values were resolutely local. The camera was definitely in too tight on the Caesar-haircutted talking-head host, who was explaining to us why we would cost the hospital a ton of money if we let the doctors and families throw procedure box wrappers and pizza boxes into the red Hazmat bio-bag trash bins. They entertainingly intercut his lecture with shots of longsuffering black men in Hazmat suits digging through redbags, separating soda bottles and bloody washcloths from pus-soaked sponges. The win plus fail part? The talking head guy, although moderately attractive despite his tragic haircut, had one feature that kept any of his lecture from hitting home with his audience. Every time the camera zoomed in on him and he looked into it, his left eye looked DIRECTLY AT HIS NOSE.  It was like a Monty Python skit. The girls in back of me kept snorting. The camera would zoom in, his right eye would be visible and the left one would go to white, the black guys would find something else nasty or ridiculous, and it kept happening for about ten minutes. There were credits that rolled at the end, go figure. Someone put her name on that.

Why I was doin it rong

Mister purry ginger cat was decidedly ill today, feverish and off his feed. It occurred to me that he had not eaten or played rodeo with his sister last night.  I felt the loose skin on his back and decided he might escape and go off and die of dehydration without a vet visit. The vet concurred. She was of the opinion that he had consumed too much squirrel earlier in the week and was suffering gastritis as a result; his belly xray was inflamed but not showing any visible squirrel parts. So one expensive injection and sub-q fluid bolus later, he got a cat taxi ride home and slept it off. He feels better tonight but he is staying in tonight to heal up, not that he is appreciating it.  Next time he shows up with vermin it is going into a Kroger bag and the garbage can, never mind how bad it smells it up, it beats paying a day's wage for belly medicine for a cat with bad taste in rodents.

This has got to be a joke

The good news is, my short-term memory started coming back. About a week ago I was able to close the book I was studying from in my graduate on-line class and remember some facts. That is huge: I was unable to do that and passed the January quiz by dint of Post-It flags throughout the text readings and class notes, and the fact that I could still read fast so I could pass an open-book test.
Same for the first two quizzes in February, and I was really starting to sweat the closed-book, proctored final. The only thing that would save me would be if they asked LOTS of practical questions, I never missed those because that is something I did for years. But last week's quiz I had all my flags at the ready, all new material, and didn't really need them, I had finally started being able to learn my work again. Brilliant, right, because today is the final. I had gone as the class required to my local college and had the librarian sign up to be my proctor. I gave her all the details on her own copies and even had her access the test site to make sure there weren't any firewalls in the way.
Right.
I got to the library today and she wasn't there. She had forgotten and gone to lunch. The assistant, a student worker, didn't know what to do. Timed test, now. Starts on time, ends on time. Fight off panic; here she comes, right as the clock ticks to test hour. Um. She is unable to access the Internet for me to take my test. When she did it before, it was on her password, and she won't do that now. Turns out? University policy is that there is no way to access the internet without being a student or teacher there. Oops. Lots of dithering in the middle here and calling the IT guy and stuff; I am 1) trying not to cry or scream, but am pretty sure I am sweating in my crotch; 2) Hoping this does not do what any stress usually does and give me huge uncontrollable diarrhea to just completely ice this fucking cake. When she just tries to blow me off twenty minutes in, I guilt her into sending an email to the online school about the situation. She takes full responsibility and admits she did not read or understand the proctor agreement.
They are supposed to let me take it tomorrow. The library downtown has signed off and they seem sane and competent. I don't have a rabbit's foot but there are four cats over here that should watch their p's and q's.